Interest in measuring and evaluating student learning in higher education is growing. There are many tools available to assess student learning. However, the use of such tools may be more or less appropriate under various conditions. This study provides some evidence related to the appropriate use of pre/post-tests. The question of whether graded…

"Coping flexibility" was defined as the ability to discontinue an ineffective coping strategy (i.e., evaluation coping) and produce and implement an alternative coping strategy (i.e., adaptive coping). The Coping Flexibility Scale (CFS) was developed on the basis of this definition. Five studies involving approximately 4,400 Japanese…

This study examines whether unfamiliar proper names affect English as a second language (ESL) learners' listening comprehension. A total of 110 intermediate to advanced ESL learners participated; comprehension of a short news text was tested under two conditions, Names Known (all proper names pre-taught in advance) and Names Unknown (all proper…

A common assumption among clinicians and researchers is that war trauma primarily involves fear-based reactions to life-threatening situations. However, the authors believe that there are multiple types of trauma in the military context, each with unique perievent and postevent response patterns. To test this hypothesis, they reviewed structured…

Being aware of, monitoring and responding constructively to students' signals of motivation and to students' signals of engagement represent two important teaching skills. We hypothesised, however, that teachers would better estimate their students' engagement than they would estimate their students' motivation. To test this hypothesis, Korean…

This study tested the hypothesis that children with speech sound disorder have generalized slowed motor speeds. It evaluated associations among oral and hand motor speeds and measures of speech (articulation and phonology) and language (receptive vocabulary, sentence comprehension, sentence imitation), in 11 children with moderate to severe SSD…

Is a "fair test" the only way to carry out science investigations? Many children (and primary teachers) following the National Curriculum in England and Wales would answer "yes" to this question. This is because fair test investigations have historically been promoted in national assessment, published curricula, schemes of work…

Racial-ethnic disparities in static levels of health are well documented. Less is known about racial-ethnic differences in age trajectories of health. The few studies on this topic have examined only single health outcomes and focused on black-white disparities. This study extends prior research by using a life course perspective, panel data from…

In a previous report, Neumann (2010) described the use of interactive computer-based simulations in the assessment of statistical concepts. This assessment approach combined declarative knowledge of statistics with experiences in interacting with computer-based simulations. The aim of the present study was to conduct a systematic evaluation of the…

Background: Although impaired social-emotional ability is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the perceptual skills and mediating strategies contributing to the social deficits of autism are not well understood. A perceptual skill that is fundamental to effective social communication is the ability to accurately perceive and interpret…

By means of data from the most comprehensive source of teacher data in the nation, Schools and Public School Teacher Staffing Survey (SASS), we designed a follow-up quantitative study to test the effects of two decades of national policy mandates on instructional time allotments for core academic subjects. We used data from the SASS data from…

Background: Maternal executive function and household regulation both are critical aspects of optimal childrearing, but their interplay is not understood. We tested the hypotheses that (a) the link between challenging child conduct problems and harsh parenting would be strongest for mothers with poorer executive function and weakest among those…

Difference between the brain's hemispheres in efficiency of intentional search of the mental lexicon with phonological, orthographic, and semantic strategies was investigated. Letter strings for lexical decision were presented at fixation, with a lateralized distractor to the LVF or RVF. Word results revealed that both hemispheres were capable of…

Aims: Concepts that may be effective in alleviating negative alcohol-related consequences among college students are protective behavioural strategies (PBSs), such as alternating alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. Our study used an innovative hypothesis-testing statistical technique (structural equation modelling, SEM) to examine the relationship…

The two-stage least squares approach together with quantile regression analysis is adopted here to estimate the educational production function. Such a methodology is able to capture the extreme behaviors of the two tails of students' performance and the estimation outcomes have important policy implications. Our empirical study is applied to the…